Month: December 2016

After facing months of criticism, Facebook has announced a plan to combat a small subset of misleading information. Adam Mosseri, Facebook's VP of News Feed, announced on Thursday that the company would be releasing some new features to eliminate what he calls "the worst of the worst," or "the clear hoaxes spread by spammers for their own gain."

The problems for Facebook began earlier this year when the company fired its editorial news staff, replacing dozens of humans with algorithms designed to surface trending news in an objective way. Immediately, fake news began inundating the trending news module. But the problem goes beyond trending news. Facebook previously admitted that scammers have bought Facebook ads designed to look like links to real news (the company no longer allows this practice). Mosseri says scammers have also used URL redirects to make it look like their fake news came from legitimate news sites.

Enlarge / Why are some people having trouble making the new Pros (left, in non-Touch Bar form) last as long as the old ones? (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

Some users of Apple’s newest MacBook Pros aren’t happy with their battery life. Though the Apple Support Communities forums, Twitter, and other message boards will necessarily amplify complaints, it does seem fairly common for users of the Touch Bar model in particular to see battery life that falls short of Apple’s 10-hour estimates for Web browsing and movie playback.

Apple called extra attention to the issue this week in the newest macOS Sierra update, not by fixing it but by removing the “time remaining” estimate that some users had been sharing to demonstrate the battery problems they were having. The accuracy of that battery estimate aside—and it was always more useful as a “rate of battery drain” indicator than as an actual time estimate—it looks like a superficial solution designed to solve a PR problem rather than an earnest effort to fix anything.

Anecdotal reports since the 10.12.2 update hit have suggested that the update could improve battery life, but I don’t think this is the case—Apple told us repeatedly and emphatically that it had taken no specific steps to improve MacBook Pro battery life in this update. According to Apple’s data, the company said the batteries appeared to be performing as intended.

Brown bear penis bones. (credit: Didier Descouens - Museum of Toulouse)

The penis bone, or baculum, has long been a knobby issue for scientists. The bone, which dangles at the tip of a male’s reproductive organ detached from the skeleton, pops up in many placental mammals. Mice, bats, cats, dogs, and hedgehogs all sport structural reinforcement in their nether regions. Walruses possess startling two-foot-long models that resemble baseball bats. Most primates, including our closest relatives, also have members in the baculum club—but humans, oddly, do not.

Over the years, researchers have come up with a number of hypotheses for why man’s manhood is boneless, but a new evolutionary study offers some evidence. Analyzing anatomy and mating practices of thousands of mammals, anthropologists Matilda Brindle and Christopher Opie of University College London suggest that humans lost their baculum due to quick sex and relatively little competition.

The findings, published Wednesday in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, may finally start to nail down our understanding of the puzzling purposes of penis bones.

Carol Raymond/JPL

Ceres may be a cold, dark, and dead world today, but scientists poring over a trove of data returned by the Dawn spacecraft have found that has not always been the case. Rather, new discoveries of ice on the surface of Ceres and other emerging clues have led planetary scientists to conclude the dwarf planet once had an inner ocean, and perhaps it even harbored life. They discussed their findings Thursday at the annual American Geophysical Union meeting during a news conference.

Ceres is the largest object in the asteroid belt. Since Dawn reached it in early 2015, the spacecraft has returned 54,000 images, 16 million visible spectra, and 21 million infrared spectra. It mapped out the dwarf planet’s gravity field in great deal. Additionally, Dawn carries a detector to study the collision of neutrons with the surface of Ceres. Based upon the energy of gamma rays produced by such collisions, the spacecraft can detect various elements at the surface and to a depth of about one meter. In the last two years Dawn has found a lot of hydrogen.

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Enlarge / Step 1: Put Nintendo Switch in head-mounted dock. Step 2: Be in virtual reality? (credit: Nintendo/USPTO/NeoGAF)

Newly published patent applications for Nintendo's upcoming Switch console describe plans for a potential head-mounted display accessory that holds the system's tablet-style screen in a virtual reality-style housing.

The diagram and description come from a trove of five patent applications (as noted by NeoGAF) that were filed with the US Patent and Trademark office on June 10 and published today. Unlike most patent applications, which may describe product ideas that will never be announced (much less released), these patents quite clearly describe the Nintendo Switch and its detachable JoyCon controllers with details that match what's known from the system's October reveal.

That being said, the unannounced head-mounted display, while patented, may never see the light of day as a real product. As it stands, the Switch's tablet screen, which reportedly runs 6.2" diagonally and sports 720p resolution, would be quite blocky compared to the displays on other virtual reality headsets. Even the first Oculus Development Kit had 800 lines of vertical resolution back in 2013.

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If you run a mainstream distribution of Linux on a desktop computer, there's a good chance security researcher Chris Evans can hijack it when you do nothing more than open or even browse a specially crafted music file. And in the event you're running Chrome on the just-released Fedora 25, his code-execution attack works as a classic drive-by.

The zero-day exploits, which Evans published on Tuesday, are the latest to challenge the popular conceit that Linux, at least in its desktop form, is more immune to the types of attacks that have felled Windows computers for more than a decade and have increasingly snared Macs in recent years.

While Evans' attacks won't work on most Linux servers, they will reliably compromise most desktop versions of Linux, which employees at Google, Facebook, and other security conscious companies often use in an attempt to avoid the pitfalls of Windows and Mac OS X. Three weeks ago, Evans released a separate Linux zero-day that had similarly dire consequences.